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A Toast to Binge Drinking

Decline and Fall

If only we did! If only my lovelorn, career-driven, diverser-than-diverse collection of classmates could stop worrying for a few moments, could let the paper and the interview and yes, the nicely-inflated GPA slide, and join me in some old-fashioned wassailing! I would submit, ever so humbly, that no Harvard student can claim to have lived, really and truly, until he has staggered drunkenly down Mt. Auburn Street singing Disney songs at the top of his voice, hurling snowballs through an open window in the Fly and bemoaning the girls (or guys) who got away. The Harvardian who has never been drunk, who has been too delicate, sensitive and yes, too scared to kneel before King Bacchus--well, I wish him the best, but he has just plain missed out.

Now I know (lest the howls of outrage rise) that some people cannot, and should not, imbibe alcohol. People with alcoholism in the family, devout Baptists and pious Muslims, diabetics and schizophrenics and several of my more, um, belligerent friends--for these folks and others, my solution to the Harvard blues is out of bounds. And of course, of course it isn't a good idea to be a blithering idiot and drink yourself into a stupor and end up at UHS, any more than it's a good idea to go skinny-dipping in shark-infested waters or eat those 49-cent McDonalds cheeseburgers until you vomit.

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But as for the other "negative consequences" of "binge drinking," like missed classes and late papers and hangovers at interviews--I say, bring them on! Most Harvard students could stand to foul up a paper or two or nurse a migraine during that all-important, life-or-death, this-is-my-future-we're-talking-about-here face-off with the guy from Salomon Smith Barney. It might give them a little perspective.

So this weekend, if your control-freak Harvard brain tells you to stay in, pump up the Simon and Garfunkel mp3s and study for that wicked chem midterm that's coming up, tell your brain to go stuff it and come on down to the Grille. They barely card you there, I hear--and the first round's on me.

Ross G. Douthat '02 is a history and literature concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.

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